After what seems an age, have finished XO by Jeffrey Deaver. It's taken so long to read that I sort of lost the plot with it. On to my 3rd PJ book now and it's rattling along well.
A few choices excerpts, read into them what you want
“And recently it hadn’t been a question of Branson’s oneupmanship getting the better of his competitive nature. Grace was on a mission to learn, to educate himself, to fill that vast cultural black hole inside his head. He had slowly come to the realization, during the past month, that his brain was a repository for pages and pages of police training manuals, rugby, football, motor-racing and cricketing facts, and not much else. And that needed to change. Quickly.”
“That movie,’ he rambled. ‘The Third Man. Carol Reed directed. The music. The zither. Gets me every time. Orson Welles peaked early, couldn’t ever repeat his early success, that was his tragedy. Poor bastard. Made some of the greatest movies of all times. But what do most people remember him for? The fat man who did the sherry commercials.”
“One quotation from a philosopher he had come across recently had given him some solace, and had taken up permanent residence in his mind. It was from Sr Kierkegaard, who wrote, ‘Life must be lived forward, but it can only be understood backwards.”
“She’s been doing all these self-improvement courses. I told you she keeps buying me these books, Men Are from Mars,Women Are from Venus, yeah? Why Women Can’t Read Maps and Men Can’t Find Stuff in Fridges, or some crap like that. Right? Well, she’s been getting angrier and angrier that I keep coming home late and she misses her courses cos she’s stuck with the kids. Right?”
“She was a very attractive, very strong-willed lady in her late twenties who had always made it abundantly clear who was boss in the Branson household. Glenn might have worn the trousers, but his face poked out through the fly buttons.”
“He stopped a courteous distance behind the first of the four balls on the fairway, noticing with some smugness just how far in front of the others his own ball was. Now that he was closer he could see just how good his drive had been. It was lagged up less than ten feet from the green.”
“The club secretary’s office at the North Brighton Golf Club had a military feel which reflected the secretary’s own background, as a retired army major who had managed to survive active service in the Falklands and Bosnia with his important bits – and most important of all, his golf handicap – intact.”
“The blowflies hadn’t arrived yet either, but they wouldn’t be long. Blowflies – or bluebottles, as they were more attractively named – could smell death from five miles away. About the same distance as newspaper reporters, of which species there was already one outside the gates, questioning the constable guarding the entrance and, from the reporter’s body language, not getting much from him.”
“Grace fell silent, thinking. He always found it easier to park his God questions safely away and to think about them only when it suited him. He wasn’t an atheist, not even really an agnostic. He did believe in something – or at least he wanted to believe in something – but he could never define exactly what. He always fell short of being able to openly accept the concept of God. And then immediately after that he would feel guilty. But ever since Sandy had disappeared, and all his prayers had gone unanswered, much of his faith had eroded.”
“Stress could cause people mental problems, make the brain function in weird ways, and he’d been under plenty of stress lately”
“The whole damn beach was a sewer of bare flesh. Bodies in skimpy clothing. White, red, brown, black. Flaunting themselves. Some of the women topless, bitch whores. He watched one waddling around, straggly ginger hair down to her shoulders, tits down to her stomach, stomach down to her pelvis, swigging a bottle of beer or lager – too far away to tell which – fat arse sticking out of a skein of electric blue nylon, thighs dimpled with cellulite. Wondered what she’d look like in his gas mask with her straggly ginger pubes jammed against his face. Wondered what it would smell like down there. Oysters?”
Excerpts From: Peter, James. “Not Dead Enough.”
Cracking series of books so far if you like your crime books
